Tourism has been hit hard by the impact of the strikes. The union of the Companies of the Journey is going to demand compensation to Air France and the SNCF because of the strikes that plague the sector, said the president of the organization Tuesday. In response to the strikes of the SNCF and Air France, “we will ask for repair at the one and the other,” explained during a press conference Jean-Pierre Mas, president of the Business of the Trip.
“Today, it is not at the stage of compensation, it is at the stage of facilitating the movement of our customers (…) then there will be talk of compensation,” he added. Following a strike in September 2014, his organization had already negotiated the doubling of remuneration paid by Air France to travel agencies, which is a percentage of the amount of the value of the airline tickets issued by the agencies. What will the union for the strikes, the current will be “in this spirit”, he said to the AFP.
More than a million euros
Regarding the request for compensation to the SNCF, the shape is still unknown, “it was never done with them”, he added. Jean-Pierre Mas has reminded that the costs related to the inability of clients to use services already paid amounted to more than a million euros for the first week of strikes in April. These charges involved for example when it must repay a customer who has not been able to go to the port to begin a cruise, or when it is necessary to reorganise her trip. The president of the Travel Companies also recalled that at the wage level, the cost of overtime needed to help customers in difficulty, in their travel because of strikes, amounted to 500,000 euros per day of strike.
Jean-Pierre Mas has also deplored “the inconvenient image of France abroad” because of the strikes and its negative impact on the attractiveness for tourism and economic of the country. At the beginning of April, the union had indicated that the drop in vacation bookings (orders) during periods of strike action was “of the order of 20% compared to the same period in 2017”.
(With AFP)
